Northern Tradition witch and "Pennsylvania Dutch" hexeri Jj Starwalker shares her thoughts and views from her Maine homestead and studio.

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Thursday, March 31, 2016

Greening Up!

We have not started to see greening outside yet, here around my
central Maine farm, though the sap buckets are no longer hanging on the
maple trees that I passed on my way to my local post office this
morning. If you don't live in an area where folks "sugar," let me say
that is one sure sign that late winter has given way to early spring.
Catching the sugar maple sap to boil down into maple syrup is dependent
on the rise and fall of the sap as warmer days revert to cold nights.
The trees are trying to start their engines, but once they are awake and
running -- even though they have not yet pushed out the buds that
signify spring to most of us -- the wheel of the year as rolled one more
bit along its cycle.

Here
at Fussing Duck farm we don't sugar, and mark the changing seasons with
the arrival of eggs. Usually our hens take their natural vacation
during the time of longest nights; we do not add lighting nor heat to
allow them their rest from laying. This past winter, though, our young
layers who started in the fall continued all winter long. Around the
beginning of the month, the ducks began to lay and more recently the
young hen turkey has presented us with a few eggs. I think that the
large duck egg, upper right, must be a "double yolker"... something that
is not terribly uncommon in the hens' offerings (we get several each
laying season) but this is the first I have ever seen from a duck!

Starting
around Imbolc/Ground Hog Day (what I call "Spring Finding) in early
February, I begin cleaning off the grow rack (a baker's rack in its more
typical setting) to start seedlings of onions and leeks. Later, lettuce
joins the mix along with cabbages and kale, broccoli and cauliflower
and finally, just this week, the tomatoes and peppers met their little
soil blocks.